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Is this the end of Little Printer? Berg announces it’s “wrapping up”
Little Printer is one of those most products your most design-obsessed friends own: launched in 2012, it sits on their desks spitting out a miniature daily "newspaper" of tweets, headlines, puzzles, analytics – and whatever else they want it to. A bit like those old stock tickers, but with a cute face.
At £150, though, its price was steep for what was tantamount to a physical version of Twitter. Too steep, it seems. This morning Berg, Little Printer's maker, announced plans to close.
In a (rhyming) statement on Berg's blog, Matt Webb, its chief executive, said the studio was "wrapping up… for this incarnation. Our partnership and our services, they're done".
Little Printer we’ll run till March next year.A skeleton crew will keep it alive.We’ll sell it. Or open the code. See herefor more. We’d love to see LP survive.We’ve not reached a sustainable businessin connected products. But: There’s our troop!Cultural inventions! I’m proud of thisBritish Experimental Rocket Group.
Then he (presumably) got so emotional he gave up on the rhymes:
Thank you fellow travellers, in your thousands.Behind the mountains, there are more mountains.
For Little Printer fans, then, there is hope – if someone decides to buy the technology, their gadgets will continue to print out daily feeds. But because of the way it works (ie. Berg runs its feeds), if the product its mothballed for good, that makes their Little Printer no more useful than an expensive, although admittedly adorable-looking paperweight.
Sad news for fans of quirky, home-grown design. Here's Little Printer's original launch video – to remind you of the good times…